The grades are – mostly – in for area schools.
Officials from the Iowa Department of Education released its new school accountability website, the Iowa School Report Card, on Wednesday morning. The public can view the report card, which includes rankings of individual school buildings, at educateiowa.gov/schoolreportcard
The report card evaluates and rates public schools based on performance on a set of measures, which include reading and math test scores, growth and performance on college and career readiness, how many students are improving academically on time, efforts to close achievement gaps for subgroups, graduation rates, average daily attendance and staff retention.
“The Iowa School Report Card is about helping Iowans find and understand important information about their public schools,” said Ryan Wise, the director of the Iowa Department of Education. “Our objective is to develop a system that is useful and fair.”
Over the past two-and-a-half years, the state has worked on the new website to comply with part of the 2013 educational reform package from the Iowa Legislature. The report card had previously been called the attendance center rankings, but it was renamed to make its function clearer.
The state invested $750,000 over two years to develop the system. Lawmakers charged the state agency with creating an “overall school performance grade and report card” for the state’s public schools.
Across southwest Iowa, ratings in the new system were a little lower than results statewide, although that picture was complicated by how many schools were left unrated in the report card. Across Iowa, there were 212 schools out of 1,343 that received no rating – or about 15.8 percent.
An analysis of The Daily Nonpareil’s coverage area found 19 buildings weren’t rated out of 90 schools in the area, representing 21 percent of the schools served by the newspaper. Those omissions included all the schools in Essex, Riverside and South Page, as well as Crescent Elementary School in the Council Bluffs school district and Kreft Primary School in the Lewis Central school district.
“There are a number of cases of where schools are unable to rate,” said Jay Pennington, chief of the state department's Bureau of Information and Analysis Services.
Pennington said ratings couldn’t be calculated for new schools, which couldn’t be compared to results from the previous year, as well as schools with a small number of students, less than 20 for any given year, which requires the data to be withheld for privacy reasons. Schools with certain grade configurations also weren’t included, such as at least five primary schools in southwest Iowa.
Ratings were assigned using a weighted ranking. Buildings with less than 70 percent of the weighting were not assigned a label, Pennington said. The website lists the areas where school information was not found. So, for example, Treynor Middle School was excluded from the ratings because it lacked data on closing achievement gaps and staff retention, according to the report card.
“We wanted to provide apples-to-apples comparisons so there is enough similar measures across a particular school level for the ratings to be comparable,” Pennington said.
Among those that were grouped into categories, school districts in The Nonpareil coverage area had 31 buildings called “acceptable” and 23 that were “commendable” in the ratings. Those classifications are the most prevalent in the state, too.
Pennington said a bell curve was used to group school buildings, with 70 percent of elementary schools, 73 percent of middle schools and 76 percent of high schools falling into those two groups. In the area, 76.1 percent of all ranked schools fell under one of the two categories.
“We want to lock the distribution in so that schools can begin to improve based on a set of anchor points and not a moving target,” he said.
The area had nine high-performing schools, including all of the Griswold Community School District, which serves Griswold and Lewis in Cass County, Elliott in Montgomery County and portions of extreme eastern Pottawattamie County. Glenwood’s West Elementary and Atlantic Middle School were also high-performing, along with the high schools in Sidney, Treynor, Tri-Center (serving the Neola area) and Underwood.
No area school was deemed “exceptional,” although two Sioux City elementary schools were among those receiving the designation. Statewide, only eight high schools, nine middle schools and 18 elementary schools reached that elite status in the first year of the rankings.
Carter Lake Elementary School, part of the Council Bluffs district, was the only area school deemed a “priority” for improvement by the department. Diane Ostrowski, the chief communications officer for the district, said that label does not carry any sanctions or additional support from the state.
Under previous federal law, districts and schools in Iowa have been identified as in need of assistance based on a different set of benchmarks. Sanctions are attached to those classifications, and it’s unclear how the new Every Student Succeeds Act will change school accountability in Iowa.
Wise said the new Iowa School Report Card fits in with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which shifts the responsibility for accountability toward the states but maintains a federal role. Nebraska recently moved to a similar model to assign ratings to schools, which neither state had previously done.
Data – which for the report card released today come from the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years – is made available in the spirit of accountability and transparency, Wise said. The ratings were developed with input from teachers, school administrators and others involved in education.
“Each school has an individual story that cannot be told through numbers and ratings,” Wise said. “I’d really encourage all of us to connect with our local public schools to get the full story.”
http://www.nonpareilonline.com/news...cle_93fec1c6-a409-11e5-8ddf-9bf74908b742.html
Officials from the Iowa Department of Education released its new school accountability website, the Iowa School Report Card, on Wednesday morning. The public can view the report card, which includes rankings of individual school buildings, at educateiowa.gov/schoolreportcard
The report card evaluates and rates public schools based on performance on a set of measures, which include reading and math test scores, growth and performance on college and career readiness, how many students are improving academically on time, efforts to close achievement gaps for subgroups, graduation rates, average daily attendance and staff retention.
“The Iowa School Report Card is about helping Iowans find and understand important information about their public schools,” said Ryan Wise, the director of the Iowa Department of Education. “Our objective is to develop a system that is useful and fair.”
Over the past two-and-a-half years, the state has worked on the new website to comply with part of the 2013 educational reform package from the Iowa Legislature. The report card had previously been called the attendance center rankings, but it was renamed to make its function clearer.
The state invested $750,000 over two years to develop the system. Lawmakers charged the state agency with creating an “overall school performance grade and report card” for the state’s public schools.
Across southwest Iowa, ratings in the new system were a little lower than results statewide, although that picture was complicated by how many schools were left unrated in the report card. Across Iowa, there were 212 schools out of 1,343 that received no rating – or about 15.8 percent.
An analysis of The Daily Nonpareil’s coverage area found 19 buildings weren’t rated out of 90 schools in the area, representing 21 percent of the schools served by the newspaper. Those omissions included all the schools in Essex, Riverside and South Page, as well as Crescent Elementary School in the Council Bluffs school district and Kreft Primary School in the Lewis Central school district.
“There are a number of cases of where schools are unable to rate,” said Jay Pennington, chief of the state department's Bureau of Information and Analysis Services.
Pennington said ratings couldn’t be calculated for new schools, which couldn’t be compared to results from the previous year, as well as schools with a small number of students, less than 20 for any given year, which requires the data to be withheld for privacy reasons. Schools with certain grade configurations also weren’t included, such as at least five primary schools in southwest Iowa.
Ratings were assigned using a weighted ranking. Buildings with less than 70 percent of the weighting were not assigned a label, Pennington said. The website lists the areas where school information was not found. So, for example, Treynor Middle School was excluded from the ratings because it lacked data on closing achievement gaps and staff retention, according to the report card.
“We wanted to provide apples-to-apples comparisons so there is enough similar measures across a particular school level for the ratings to be comparable,” Pennington said.
Among those that were grouped into categories, school districts in The Nonpareil coverage area had 31 buildings called “acceptable” and 23 that were “commendable” in the ratings. Those classifications are the most prevalent in the state, too.
Pennington said a bell curve was used to group school buildings, with 70 percent of elementary schools, 73 percent of middle schools and 76 percent of high schools falling into those two groups. In the area, 76.1 percent of all ranked schools fell under one of the two categories.
“We want to lock the distribution in so that schools can begin to improve based on a set of anchor points and not a moving target,” he said.
The area had nine high-performing schools, including all of the Griswold Community School District, which serves Griswold and Lewis in Cass County, Elliott in Montgomery County and portions of extreme eastern Pottawattamie County. Glenwood’s West Elementary and Atlantic Middle School were also high-performing, along with the high schools in Sidney, Treynor, Tri-Center (serving the Neola area) and Underwood.
No area school was deemed “exceptional,” although two Sioux City elementary schools were among those receiving the designation. Statewide, only eight high schools, nine middle schools and 18 elementary schools reached that elite status in the first year of the rankings.
Carter Lake Elementary School, part of the Council Bluffs district, was the only area school deemed a “priority” for improvement by the department. Diane Ostrowski, the chief communications officer for the district, said that label does not carry any sanctions or additional support from the state.
Under previous federal law, districts and schools in Iowa have been identified as in need of assistance based on a different set of benchmarks. Sanctions are attached to those classifications, and it’s unclear how the new Every Student Succeeds Act will change school accountability in Iowa.
Wise said the new Iowa School Report Card fits in with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which shifts the responsibility for accountability toward the states but maintains a federal role. Nebraska recently moved to a similar model to assign ratings to schools, which neither state had previously done.
Data – which for the report card released today come from the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years – is made available in the spirit of accountability and transparency, Wise said. The ratings were developed with input from teachers, school administrators and others involved in education.
“Each school has an individual story that cannot be told through numbers and ratings,” Wise said. “I’d really encourage all of us to connect with our local public schools to get the full story.”
http://www.nonpareilonline.com/news...cle_93fec1c6-a409-11e5-8ddf-9bf74908b742.html
